


Longing is like the seed

by jspringsteen



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Greek Mythology - Freeform, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-13
Updated: 2016-05-13
Packaged: 2018-06-08 05:36:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6841129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jspringsteen/pseuds/jspringsteen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liebgott sows and Webster reaps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Longing is like the seed

Longing is like the Seed  
That wrestles in the Ground,  
Believing if it intercede  
It shall at length be found.

 

The Hour, and the Clime—  
Each Circumstance unknown,  
What Constancy must be achieved  
Before it see the Sun!

-Emily Dickinson

* * *

 

“Liebgott says he’s guilty.”

“He probably is.”

Because there is no way to tell now. Guilty, innocent, war criminal or war hero; it’s all the same, it just depends which side bangs the gavel.

Because his eyes smouldered like coals in the half-dark of the barracks, when my back was pressed against the wood and I felt how close he was to me, like a tightly strung wire that has been flicked.

Because I wasn’t at Bastogne, looked away when they took an ice pick to his heart—chip, chip, chip—and snow would always be a burden to him and to me a joy. Because I abandoned him.

As I abandon him now. I will not shoot. I feel the vibration in the air, the cry of millions of souls, the cry that has gripped Joe around the throat with ashy fingers. Yet I believe that if one life can be saved, it must. The time for killing is past.

What can grow in these fields, scorched by fire and pockmarked by mortar rounds?  We plow, we sow, we carry on. Shifty and I talked about what we were going to do after the war. “I feel like I can do just about anything,” he said, and tears glazed his eyes. “Here, I’m good at what I do. Back home…” He didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t need to. We all felt it. What the hell do we do now? We will let the wind pick us up and drop us where it deems appropriate. Some will get the lush, green pastures of Holland and blossom like the thistles by the side of the road—unwanted, but undoubtedly beautiful. Others will get the dry forest floor embedded with rusting metal, and will have to work their way around the shrapnel from the trees and the guns.

A pen has scratched lines into Joe’s face where there were none before, the same pen that signed for the murder of millions. I touch my thumb to those lines, want to rub them out. Ashes to ashes.

You wouldn’t think he could spell “reconnaissance patrol” to look at him, but he’s sharp, Joe. Sharp as a piece of shrapnel. He understands some things much better than I do. But the edges of his heart are ragged. I have to be careful not to cut myself. So I slide my arm across his waist, slowly, trying to mould him against me. Trying to soften him.

In Holland, after our failed attack on Eindhoven, we stood in line for chow—it struck me then. I turned around with my full plate and scanned the room for a place to sit. Joe, his fork poised as if he were raking the air with it. We locked eyes. He raked, and I sowed.

I didn’t know if the seed would have survived the endless rain of Holland, or the bitter cold of Bastogne. But it was strong. It wasn’t a flimsy early bloomer, blown out of the earth by the pouring down of rain and rounds. It was more like a thistle. It took a beating, yes, but it thrived in spite of it.

When Joe and I first saw each other again after in Haguenau, I withered under his gaze. I wanted to take his hands in mine and blow on them, rub them, in the hope that warming his hands would thaw his heart. But he would not look at me; always over my shoulder, in the distance, lay the horrors that occupied his mind, horrors that hadn’t caught up to me yet. Perhaps they never will.

When they asked me about the patrol, that was the first time he looked at me again. And I felt his hand on my arm, warm, though it should have been cold. “Your secret’s safe, Web,” he said, and his eyes were full of longing—and at that moment I felt how the green shoot had wrestled itself to poke out of the earth. That night he tiptoed to my bunk—never for longer than a half hour, in case we should fall asleep and wake up together—and he wrapped himself around me. He whispered in my ear, questions that I couldn’t answer and promises I couldn’t make, and pleas for things I could not mend.

When we drove through Germany, we saw whole towns reduced to heaps of rubble and sand. A city is just space, anyway; when it crumples in on itself it looks so much smaller. All I could think about was sandcastles getting washed away by the merciless waves. The smell of spring was in the air. On the heaps of rubble grew flowers and weeds. Sometimes we turned on the BBC Radio and listened how miles away from here the waves had pounded London into rubble, too. But people who called in found that new species of wildflowers were sprouting from the sandbags and talked about how many stars they could see during the blackout.

The man is lying face down in the lush alpine grass. The mountains stretch themselves behind him. As you sow, so shall you reap. I reap Joe’s anger and his grief, pull them out by their thick stalks as their gnarled roots cling desperately to the dark earth in which they thrived and choked the tender bud of us nearly to death. Nearly.

Liebgott is guilty. As am I. As are we all. But here among the ruins of Europe we found soil, fertile enough for us to thrive. We endured the cold and the rain, but received just enough sunshine to bloom occasionally. Some of us were uprooted, thrown away. We quickly infested the whole bed, choking the native vegetation.

But the edelweiss, high up in the mountains, cannot be weeded out. It will remain there, the elusive paragon of Germany and Austria’s natural beauty. And what of the black clouds that rained down from the ovens? I think of the blood-red sea of poppies in Flanders fields. Ash may make soil fertile, but can new life really sprout on Death’s stage?

I look at Joe’s gaunt face and hollow eyes as he drives us back. I picture the shades roaming the Elysian fields who feast on a puddle of blood and slowly regain their features and their voice. We are driving towards bright Mount Olympus, the kingdom of the gods, but Joe has retreated to its chtonic counterpart. Not on the Elysian Fields, after all. Perhaps he imagines himself suffering eternally in the Fields of Punishment. Perhaps he is still sitting in Charon’s boat, still tasting the copper of the coin on his tongue and staring into the waters of the river of hatred, black as venom. Perhaps he feels he is pushing the fate of his people upwards and further upwards, like Sisyphus, only to let it crush him when he nears the top of the hill.

Can I descend, like Orpheus, and persuade him to come back with me? Can I stop myself from looking over my shoulder to make sure he’s following me?

Our thistle is covered in prickles. Pity any animal that tries to eat it. Yet bees will use it to make honey, and once the purple has given way to white, we will spread what has been sown on the battlefields of Europe. And thistles will grow anywhere. They can protect themselves against demons. Some people will weed them out to make room for something beautiful, but nobody touches a thistle without being punished for it.

I put my hand on Joe’s knee. He looks down, then back at the road, stony-faced; but then he covers it with his own.


End file.
